This realisation that there was such an arena of human life, and that she had been too childishly short-sighted even to perceive that it existed—this realisation stung her. It offended her own pride in her scientific curiosity. She decided the proper scientific thing to do was to study the phenomenon more fully. But the library possessed no books on the subject—no books, that is, on human sexual life. Her reticence, bred carefully into her all her life, of course deterred her from actually asking the librarian outright. And the catalogue of books, a handwritten folio, listed no relevant titles. It was, of course, an indecent topic: the lack of books did not surprise her. But she did not give up the quest for knowledge. The best she could do was to read general works of instructive biology. She attended carefully to each of Dr Hartwig’s Popular Accounts of Natural History, beginning with The Tropical World, and going on to The Polar World, The Aerial World and The Sea and Its Living Wonders. Each book, with three hundred woodcuts and eight of the new-fangled coloured chromoxylographs, provided immense quantities of data, but only the tiniest proportion of this was concerned with reproduction. By poring over the volumes and comparing their different descriptions Eleanor came to the conclusion that all males of whatever species possessed sex organs, external to their bodies, attached to gonadic glands that produced sperm. She also learnt that the female’s sexual organs were receptive rather than active, that the sperm was deposited in the uterine cavity, and that the young grew in this place. She took out Herbert Howe Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, but it contained no mention of reproduction at all, and Eleanor felt that she had wasted her shilling. Then she chanced upon a small book, evidently designed as a practical manual for farmers (she wondered, indeed, how it had found its way into a London lending library): Pig Breeding, with additional remarks upon Swine Fever by George Tregelles. From this book she gleaned that the male organ in pigs is “considerably larger than in most Mammals when erect”; and from this last word she deduced that the male organ assumed an erect posture during mating as a necessary part of the process.

  She lay in bed and explored her own body. She had concluded, by a process of elimination, which were her own sexual organs. The various fragmentary allusions to the whole business, which had always been by necessity oblique and veiled, assembled themselves in her head. Somehow the man, becoming “erect,” deposited sperm in the small cavity at the base and the front of her torso.

  She felt a disinclination to touch herself between her thighs, as if it were somehow wrong or shameful, and yet she could not remember ever having been specifically rebuked for doing so. Where had she learnt the interdiction? She remembered when her father had been alive, and she had been nine years old—the last months of his illness, in fact, when they were still living in the house in Greenwich. There had been many comings and goings, doctors with their servants, apothecaries and tradesmen of every description. One playful serving man, waiting in the kitchen for his master to come down from upstairs, had joked and jollied with Eleanor for an hour. She had been only a child, not yet old enough to be discouraged from loitering in the servants’ quarters, and this servant had been immensely attentive, asking her questions, stroking her hair, laughing. Then, suddenly, the cook had blustered in and shooed him away, afterwards rebuking Eleanor with severity for spending time with the fellow. At the time it had been that severity that stuck in her head, and the shame of the tears she had cried. But now, in bed, she remembered the cook’s actual words. A lady has to watch herself with men, she had said. Men want one thing, and they’ll try anything to get it, they want to put themselves in you and they’ll try anything to do that, and you mustn’t let them. Do you understand? None of this had meant anything to the nine-year-old. But as a young woman, after her menses had started, after reading the books, Eleanor had a flashing sense of what the cook had been getting at. The male organ, which was (evidently) no thicker than a little finger, must be inserted in here. There seemed, to her exploratory fingers, very little room, but doubtless nature had arranged for that. She wondered how long the process should take—seconds, she supposed.

  It was strange. She felt she had solved that particular problem, and thereby added to her sum of knowledge. Therefore she could move on to other scientific learning. But the issue refused to leave her mind. She found herself wondering about the exact protocols of the procedure. She found that a delicate touch of her hand on those parts in her bed at night was pleasurable; and again she had the instinctive sense that this was shameful, that she must not speak of it to Mamma. Every time another piece of the jigsaw came her way she stored the information in her mind. Mrs Fox Talbot’s serving maid was dismissed for getting herself with child. Mamma and Mrs Fox Talbot talked about the scandal of it in hushed tones, thinking Eleanor absorbed in her book. But Eleanor, listening, learned that the foolish little minx had fallen for a soldier. That he was already married, but the little trollop had pursued him anyway, declaring herself in love with him like a penny romance, and that the two had gone off to Shrewsbury together. She came back, of course, said Mrs Fox Talbot, in tears, though I guessed what she had been up to (Shocking, Mamma had whispered, nodding), and had cried and begged to be taken back. And I took her back, but her condition became only too clear in a few months. And Eleanor learned one further detail, for Mrs Fox Talbot related that her husband had wanted to find out the father’s identity and report the fact to his regiment, to his commanding officer, for punishment; but that Mrs Fox Talbot had persuaded him not to—after all, she said, it is the girl’s fault, not the man’s. Men can’t help themselves, of course.

  Their landlord at Poland Street was a man called George Newsome, a paunchy man of diminutive stature with a fox-like fuzz of ginger for hair and pale, mournful eyes. He was barely a gentleman, though always quiet and polite in Eleanor’s company. But he would call at the apartment once a month, or sometimes more frequently, to collect the rent from Mamma, and discuss any subject that related to the rooms. On those occasions Mamma would shoo Eleanor from the front room, send her to her own room, or out to the shops with the strict maternal command not to disturb her conference with Mr Newsome. “Mr Newsome has no desire,” she would snap, “to be bothered with the prattlings of a girl like you. He and I must discuss the ground-rent” (or the pipes, or the roof, or the yard, or whatever it chanced to be), “and we are not to be disturbed.” Of course Eleanor accepted this on face value. Why should she not? She curtsied to Mr Newsome, who bowed shallowly in return, and then she went out into the open air.

  It was a sunny day, a June day, and Eleanor—knowing her mother’s preference in the matter—had volunteered to walk out to sit in Soho Square and read for the duration of Mr Newsome’s visit. She had tripped down the stairs, feeling light in her heart and happy, and had reached the end of Poland Street before realising that she had brought the wrong book. She had meant to bring the first volume of Mrs Markham’s History of France, from the Conquest by the Gauls; but she had actually picked up a volume of Lisette’s Venture, by the Author of “Thomasina,” which was of a similar size and had similar-coloured binding. Had her mother’s novel been a little more interesting to her, or had she not become quite caught up in the narrative of early French history, she might have simply sat and read Lisette’s Venture in the sunshine, and that would have been that. But she wanted her own book. So she came back up the street, up the stairs, and let herself into the apartment. She told herself that she might ease the door to the front room open, slip inside, retrieve her book and depart without interrupting her mother’s conversation with Mr Newsome. And so she turned the knob with that tentative, controlled touch we use when we want to operate a door-handle without it squeaking. She exerted the slightest pressure on the door and inserted her body a little way through the opening she had made.

  The scene inside was nothing she had seen before, but it did not bewilder her. She knew straight away what was occurring, what it must be, and at first the fact registered in her brain without shock. The curtains were drawn across the windows. Her mother was lying face-down over the chaise, her skirts thrown forward over her body with the crenulated hem lying across her shoulders. Her legs were bare all the way up to her waist, and those two pale shapes’ rising Λ were what first caught the eye. Then Eleanor took in her mother’s whole posture, and then she saw Mr Newsome’s relationship to the whole. He too was naked from the waist down, his own legs darker and thinner than Mamma’s, his bottom squarely saggy. At the moment that Eleanor opened the door he was in the act of stepping backwards, at an angle to her point of view. His male generative organ (the first that Eleanor had ever seen) waggled a little, forming an angle of no more than fifteen degrees from his stomach. It was of considerable size, or so it seemed to Eleanor. It was darker than Newsome’s sallow legs and hands. In the shadowy room it seemed almost black. Newsome spoke a single phrase, “Lie still Madam,” to which Mamma replied only with a little half-sigh. And then Newsome stepped over towards the chaise and took his male generative organ in his left hand. He positioned it between Mamma’s legs and inserted. Immediately he began swaying his hips forward and backwards, making little grunting noises.

  Mamma lay absolutely motionless.

  Eleanor extracted herself from the room as silently as she could, and drew the door closed behind her. The latch caught with a loud click.

  It might have been a gunshot for the effect it had on Eleanor’s nerves.

  It was that click that was, for her, the most terrible aspect of the entire encounter. Without it the thing she had seen might have remained a sort of waking dream, a glitch in the ordinary parade of magic-lantern scenes that made up the sights of a day. But the click sealed the occasion.

  Eleanor fled the apartment.

  Mamma, and Mr Newsome, must have heard the door clicking shut, and would know therefore that they had been observed. It seemed to Eleanor, pacing the streets in a sort of frenzy of anxiety, that they must know it had been her. The latch of the door had sounded a sort of death-knell. Everything must tumble now. In her mind she recited the ways in which she was going to have to justify her spying, reciting over and over the innocence of her intention to retrieve the book, only that and nothing more, and adding, in her own head—with ferocious emphasis—that she had seen nothing, that there had been nothing to see. Hours passed and passed. She wore the pavements down with walking round and round, all the length of Oxford Street and back several times. She loitered in Marylebone Park.

  Finally, she could put off the return no longer. She crept up the stairs, her heart palpitating like a death-rattle in her breast, and opened the door. Sally greeted her in the hallway. As if stepping up to face headsman, block and axe, she went through into the front room and greeted her Mamma.

  She was sat, in the same chaise over which Eleanor had observed her prone earlier, with the newspaper in her hands. The curtain was drawn back from the window and the evening sky was bright through the glass. As Eleanor came into the rooms he looked up and said: “Hello my dear. You were gone for ever such a long time.” The words seemed free of accusation. There was no cloud over her mother’s face, and no savour of accusation in her manner.

  “I went for a walk, Mamma,” Eleanor returned in as blithe a voice as she could muster.

  Mamma’s attention went back to the newspaper. “The weather has been very pleasant today,” she said.

  And so life went on, exactly as it had done before. For about a week Eleanor fretted and worried, when lying in her bed at night, over whether her mother knew that Eleanor had observed her with Mr Newsome. She might, it was possible to imagine, have thought the door opened by Sally (although Sally never entered a room without being first summoned). Or perhaps she had thought the wind had moved the door, or that it had been a different door in the apartment, or that the click had been some other noise. Eleanor fretted and fretted, but even she knew, in some small place inside her mind, that she was shifting her anxiety from the act itself onto this associated worry of having been detected. Agonising over the clicking of the latch blocked out any too vivid mental picture of her mother prone and Mr Newsome half-naked. That was what she could not allow herself to picture.

  Yet the image kept entering her mind. Unconnected items in the world seemed to trigger the involuntary memory: a chair seen at an angle so that its legs seemed to make the shape of an A. The hind quarters of a horse in harness with the cabman snapping his long whip down. Sally, observed from behind as she reached forward to un-snib the latch to the window. Eleanor would see these things, and the image of the darkened room, and Mamma’s posture, and Newsome’s thin, dark legs, and the vine-stick protuberance of his male organ, would illuminate itself inside her head again.

  Subsidiary questions sometimes occurred to her, unbidden—why would her Mamma submit to such a treatment? Had it happened to her before? What of the other gentlemen with whom Mamma occasionally had private conversations?—what of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, for instance? Or Professor Ludwig Urlichs in Mayfair? But these questions had to be forcefully eliminated from her mind, overlaid with thoughts of mathematical theorems, or The Steam Engine and Miniature Steam Engine, or The Naturalist in Nicaragua, a Narrative of a Residence at the Gold Mines of Chontales, with Observations on Animals and Plants, or Half-Hours with the Stars: A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations, or whichever book she happened to have taken from the library for that week. She attempted to plunge into the books like a diver into a freezing sea, so that nothing but the astringent nature of the element could impinge on her consciousness. That was the way to avoid the insidious imagining of Professor Urlichs—enormous, pastry-fleshy Urlichs with his dewlaps big as goitres and his bulging eyeballs—imagining Professor Urlichs naked and Mamma naked and the two of them arranging together for the male spermatic material to be disseminated into the female after the fashion that Eleanor had herself now witnessed. Rather than think of that, Eleanor was content to devote the most minute attention to her reading. How it was that Mamma did not become pregnant was beyond her, but Eleanor did not want to think about that. Perhaps Mamma was past the age at which pregnancy was possible, but Eleanor didn’t want to think of it.

  Several weeks afterwards they took out the clarence and trotted along to Hyde Park to watch the soldiers form and march and wheel and reform. For the first time Eleanor found the experience actively upsetting. There was an avidity in her mother’s perusal of the officers on their horses that she found repulsive. A veil had fallen. She pictured the naked male forms beneath their uniforms; imagined their male organs of generation growing erect, sizeable as a swine’s, and in her imagination her Mamma was watching and thinking precisely the same thing.

  Eleanor pressed her gloved hand to her lips. Her mother asked if she was ill, but she could press her teeth very fiercely together, and she could insist that she was well, she was fine, she was in perfect health, and so she did.

  No mention was ever made of the clicking of the latch.

  Slowly the idea grew in Eleanor’s mind that perhaps Mamma had not heard that sound. Perhaps it had not been as loud as she had, at the time, feared. Maybe Mamma had been distracted. But without the latch to focus upon she found it harder to block out flickers of memory relating to the scene itself. A month later Newsome called again, and Eleanor had a sort of hysteric attack, almost fainting in the hallway, supporting herself against the wall. She raised herself, drawing on all her willpower to put her brave face on, to smile away expressions of concern. She hurried out of the apartment as soon as was polite. She hurried through the streets as if pursued by a djinn from the Arabian Nights, and found herself on Charing Cross Road. There, though a single lady alone, she went into a coffee shop and took coffee, ignoring the glances of the other clientele.

  Thoughts in her head, of whatever sort they might be, seemed always related to the male generative organ. She fretted over the matter of how it became hardened—for she knew that this organ was not hard all the time, but rather that it alternated between a flaccid and a hard state (although why Nature had decreed such a circumstance necessary was beyond her). Did a bone, or cartilaginous protrusion, insert itself? She could not think how else it might happen. She thought of it jabbing, dagger-like. She daydreamed it as a gormandising, a gluttonous and devouring act. The male devoured the female, chewing and masticating and crushing utterly the softer female flesh. Was the male organ equipped, perhaps, with a little mouth, with little teeth? It was clear to her why women, or women of a high enough class, were kept in the dark on this topic. Lie still Madam, Newsome had said to Mamma, in the quiet of that room; and normally he was so softly spoken and polite. There had been menace in those words. Why was Mamma required to lie still? Was she wriggling with pain, with discomfort perhaps? And Newsome was at the apartment now—was Mamma repeating the encounter now, at this very minute?